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Copyright © 2016 by Mario Massari, Gianfranco Gianfrate, and Laura Zanetti.
All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available:
ISBN 9781119003335 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781119003359 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119003342 (ePub)
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Alicia_Garcia/iStockphoto
The value of a business is essentially related to three main factors: its current operations, its future prospects, and its embedded risk. The advent of globalization, new technologies, and the consequences of the recent financial crisis completely reshaped these elements, thus making more elusive the definition of company “value” and of the metrics to measure it.
Firstly, firms do business in a context becoming progressively faster, more diverse, and more interconnected so that also valuing their current operations is a task less straightforward than in the past. Secondly, forecasting future macro and business related dynamics is getting less standardized in a business environment characterized by inherent difficulty in predicting changes – both on the upside and on the downside – and by constant innovation for companies that are more and more exposed to hyper-competitive industry dynamics. Thirdly, new types of risks and competition, so far unknown (think for example of climate change risks), are shaping both the operational and the financial side of enterprises, redefining the importance of managing uncertainty as a key element to achieve success.
In this context, the book is organized in three parts. In the first part of the book (Chapters 1 to 4), the main focus is on the relationship between value and business/economic uncertainty. In an environment characterized by an increased complexity where the concept of value itself is challenged, we provide a definition of corporate value based on a holistic approach, thus encompassing both the accounting and the financial perspective (
